Online Music Stores: Music to Your Ears?

After a rocky beginning, to say the least, the Internet and the music industry are finally getting along. We tested three new online servicesApple iTunes Music Store for Windows, MusicMatch Downloads, and Napster 2.0to see which delivers the best features and selection.

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Early efforts to bring music online fell into two camps: illicit file-sharing setups such as Napster and Kazaa or industry-sanctioned subscription services such as Pressplay and Rhapsody. But as the tepid response to the latter showed, users didn't want to pay an ongoing monthly fee for service with strings attachedsuch as no transfers to a CD or portable player, having songs "expire" after a set time, and so on.

Instead, as Apple iTunes Music Store for the Mac showed, users wanted to download as much or as little as they liked and pay only for what they bought. Now that the winning formula has been hit upon, it's rapidly being improved.

Apple has brought the iTunes Music Store to the Windows world and has added some nifty new shopping features to its complete jukebox abilities. MusicMatch Downloads marries the company's top-notch jukebox program with the ability to purchase songs online. And the now-legit Napster 2.0 is the first to merge an à la carte shopping site with a subscription service. All three bring lower prices (99 cents per song, $9.99 for most albums) and a sense of fun and immediacy to online music shopping.

In addition to music sales, each program aims to be your main interface for storing, downloading, and organizing your music library (be it songs you purchase or files you rip from CDs you already own). Each can burn your music selections onto CDs that can be played in any CD player. But we found that the application with the best online music store (Napster 2.0) is certainly not the best jukebox (a distinction that belongs to MusicMatch). So you might well find yourself purchasing in one applet but organizing in another.

Another caveat: While each of the services offers hundreds of thousands of songs, many hundreds of thousands more are missing. As for the types of music available, the three services reviewed here don't vary all that much. All have strong rock catalogs and good assortments of country, jazz, classical, and other major genres. But we couldn't say that one is amazing for jazz or another huge on 1950s rock; each has a fairly representative sampling.

Troy Dreier is a technology writer and editor based in Jersey City, NJ. He’s the editor of OnlineVideo.net, senior associate editor for StreamingMedia.com, and a former staff editor for PC Magazine. He’s @tdreier on Twitter.
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